The human being today is living in direct and indirect civilizations simultaneously in a concurrent mode. Every civilization is believed to function with certain determined patterns of norms and conditions. The era we are living in has come up the ages wherein we are following certain fixed learning and evolving approach through our societal, institutional, moral and beliefs based framework. The learning being the specialized component of evolution of human being, all aspects of human efforts are concentrated towards acquiring knowledge, experiencing, skills development, and such other brain training assignments. The significant aspect of human behavioral trait towards these learning and evolution practices is we are dealing with our learning interface essentially in close proximity to ourselves, though telecommunication and remote access has revolutionized our lives.
After widely using web as a source for information, businesses, knowledge workers and web user in general are demanding greater deal of intelligent utilities to fulfill their knowledge requirement. Web being a information platform facilitating a ‘information highway’ where huge number of data and information stalls on the said high way are continuously storing their contents and users surfing on the said highway browsing that contents. Search engine proving a boon to surf on the said high way to find out relevant information, wherein unfortunately knowledge access is far from reality. Various e-Learning modules developed so far are trying to satisfy this demand in much personalized manner, alternatively, knowledge searching itself asks for three core requirements
1. Knowledge resources,
2. Intelligent searching tool, and
3. Economic model for knowledge dissemination.
The syntax and structures have formed basic building blocks of the said information highway, remarkably missed out with context and semantics of the information hence lacking intelligence to an interpretative level. Thus currently searching via various search engines are carried out on the said information highway on the similar structured format, leading to provide unresponsive, irrelevant results rather than something very contextual and relevant. Many such techniques follow comparative use trends, to formulate relevance level. Alternatively other search techniques rely on categorization of web sites to further focus the search results to areas anticipated to be most relevant. These are all index driven approach rather than context driven, hence lesser intelligent.
On the other hand knowledge is by and large is pretty dynamic entity wherein one cannot present knowledge with the rigid boundaries. Human communication in general exploits this very virtue of our brain to express things in the plurality of contextual engagements. While identifying it in the network environment the data should have semantic identifiers to be understood by the machine, this forms important consideration for the evolution of ‘semantic web’, a project that intends to create a universal medium for information exchange by giving meaning, in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web forming an extension of the current Web, in which we add support for databases in machine-readable form. The current Web supports documents, pages of text and figures designed for humans. The Semantic web aimed to add support for databases, vast collections of information neatly organized to be processed by machines. Searching proposed to be similar fashioned but having more machine understandable contexts and semantics written in structured language for machines. By no means is the semantic web aimed to build thinking, feeling Artificial Intelligence, but merely to collect data in a useful way, like a large database.
Thus interacting with uncontrolled information and communication media of Internet refers to indirect civilization, wherein we are having two lives to live with, a true-life and a fictitious one, Internet information doesn't reflects the relations and contents available in true life, though it provides unlimited unstructured communication opportunities. Trading is also a human centric process; hence it signifies the human involvement in the e-commerce activities, which is presently highly machine based process, we need human interpretation to arrive at a judgmental state of mind, as one of the intriguing aspect of knowledge gaining is it needs fresh resources to check, recheck and crosscheck available information to fulfill and satisfy brain demand so as to convert the said information into dependable knowledge.
However human psychology towards receiving something from somewhere depends on his trust in the source of knowledge. Globally knowledge is distributed in plurality of human brains, which need to be preidentified to prosper trust towards knowledge seeking behavior of human being. Currently knowledge management systems which are under public use are mainly addressing broader issues and are subject focused in nature, one such example is of www.expertsexchange.com, which is a knowledge portal mainly provides answers for computer science related questions only that too from unidentified experts, wherein knowledge seeker and expert does not undergo a active dialog, which ultimately put the questions at the perusal of the said expert thus not ensuring any control over timely delivery of answers. Thus one way communication pattern seems to be not very systematic and intelligent enough to guide knowledge seeker to relevant expert.
Similarly existing internet advertisement and eCommerce facilities are trying to communicate with users at pretty superficial level which simply can't appeal to human psychology unless very relevant or which is exactly what a particular user is searching for. The similar eCommerce related advertising contents are exemplified in the patent application no 20050165656 which is teaching enablement of wide scale programmatic interaction of heterogeneous applications and computers by means of prevailing protocols including HHTP, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI via invocation of plurality of web services. Interestingly the said system enabling wide scale management of web services providers and web services consumers, assuring the sales transactions facilitating ecommerce in much transparent way. Though this system works efficiently within its boundaries, on the downside lacks real time human intelligence integration and use of it to facilitate ecommerce, as that's been the usual way the trade works in real life. Still further though centralize web services invocation provide comprehensiveness, consistency, enhanced search features unfortunately has certain inherent shortcomings on the ground of local control, flexibility, fixed file formats and prohibited sharing thereof, huge server and indexes maintenance, dependency on server for all resources. The system does not have any provision for multilateral communication, also real time knowledge invocation is not possible and anybody can not contribute anything from anywhere and as with other systems here too users are made passive, restricting communication with unknown.
Presently available all systems of communication mainly works on the unique identity of users, the same is highly ignored aspect in internet communication, leaving apart knowledge sharing a more sensitive and valued entity, which catapulted into open unstructured information platform which provides open ground for cyber crimes, theft and insecure communication. Understandably enough we discuss, share and communicate our private, sensitive and secrete matters on phone just because we know identity of a person and we believe no body else is tapping in between the wires the same doesn't applies to internet information communication medium.
Hence it presses on paramount requirement of human identity throughout the network to share securely. A unique identity creation underlines imagination of serialized and structured world wherein each identity specific changes are stored, monitored and regulated with systems offering access on the basis of said unique commonly defined parameter. This sounds something over demanding from our social and civilized practices and governmental machinery to devise unique identity. There are various pitfalls which we have come across and badly experienced since the advent of internet including cyber crimes, hacking, viruses spreading, etc, all because of unknown identity and opportunity to be destructive at will without harming oneself.
The secured systems can only foster knowledge availability in the network environment the same not guaranteed today hence point toward important global concern of human knowledge, skills and expertise underutilization. Furthermore all existing information and knowledge dissemination systems are working on a negative business model, wherein the system doesn't provides users with an arrangement to proactively exploit system. In later case, users are considered as a passive entity and can't offer any services to the system thus a user in possession of knowledge; skills and expertise are not used at all.
The wastage of human knowledge requires formation of human grid to exploit the enormous human brain power. Lack of security pointing out identity creation challenge to keep track of knowledge sources, offering local processing, sharing and data management are some of the features not available in existing information and knowledge systems.
Hitherto knowledge induction for individuals, entity and institutions has been organized by means of libraries, scholarly journals, digital libraries, exhibitions, symposiums, conferences, classroom teaching, mentoring etc. All of the above methods of knowledge inductions require communication, wherein communication forming the essential media for such induction. Through advances in information technology, this very need of communication has been tremendously addressed evolving plurality of communication modes including email, chatting, messaging, video conferencing, and online coaching, etc. The preceding modes though providing efficient ways of communication lack system for aggregation of knowledge. It seems that the very premise of knowledge management has been misleading or misinterpreted by industry wherein all prior efforts are concentrated on making system (digital) more intelligent so as to impart knowledge to human being, which is not true as best mode of communication is human to human communication, wherein technology is always going to be facilitating instrument doing some part of human brain rather than one having an exact human like behavior and intelligence, wherein the behavior propound the dynamics of human both mental and physical activities.
Information technology and contemporary related technologies has addressed this issue of human to human communication through plurality of ways including public domain access media i.e. internet providing free information with easy access by means of search engines enabling the selection & filtration of huge information contents on the web comprising Static, out dated (not current), irrelevant, not processed. Unfortunately the precision and relevance level of results of existing engines are not satisfactory though useful with plurality of attempts and efforts therefor. Similarly the ecommerce and marketing feature thereof has been restricted because of multiple practical problems faced by trade and industry requiring authority, genuinity, and physical guarantors towards purchase, no doubt technical implementation has been successful carried out, it is still lacking on the user-friendly extensive ecommerce enabled features and are deemed necessary for next generation cyber trading business.
In the category of private domain access i.e. peer to peer communication has been extensively used and perused system for social, relational & personal networks and other networks including business and enterprise-wise networks still human intelligence aspect of the same is not addressed with similar nature of problem facing the industry with increased contents thereof, catapulting the similar efforts to the knowledge management initiatives. The seamless activity of knowledge sharing is possible only by institution of systems facilitating anything being potentially connected to anything. However although P2P computing systems being able to establish a direct connection with each other that enables the sharing of data and system resources with minimal involvement of centrally managed servers, what is not available therein is relationship dynamism management to accommodate dynamic network connectivity pattern and enhanced decentralize mode of operandi providing significant level of autonomy to users from centralized index or repository. P2P is proving to be a promising to improve communication, collaboration and information sharing. The sharing capability of the same is exemplified by one or more applications like Napster and Gnutella which have made it possible for internet users to actively share MP3 files across the net without the need of a central repository of files. On the similar lines a P2P based knowledge sharing system is still in the nascent stages as one cannot tag knowledge as files.
On the communication front P2P has also made real time communication possible by instant messaging. The enterprise wide enablement efforts has resulted in pretty effective P2P systems such as Groove Network, OpenCola, and Nextpage which are promising range of communication, collaboration, search and file sharing services.
In a debate over centralize versus decentralize system, each one demonstrate its own advantages and disadvantages wherein on one hand as centralize system offers wide scope, control and organization on the other hand decentralize system promising future advantages of ad hoc loosely coupled systems, specialist file sharing, and specialist indexing and deployment. Groove and Napster being ad hoc and loosely coupled systems offered creation of virtual teams, and cross-company B2B projects facilitating multidimensional collaboration assistance which is not possible with centralize system. Searching nodes for information in P2P does not call for file type redundancies as with central server software which is more data focused than actual resources; an extension of similar studies is underway on JXTA P2P Platform.
Collaboration and discovery are important aspects of knowledge management in a P2P environment one such example of it is a Groove Networks developed by Ray Ozzie which offers a Groove platform for development and deployment of collaborative solutions based on peer to peer communications. A platform consists of the Groove client, underpinned by system, development and integration services, enabling group of users to communicate and share information using a set of out of the box tools including instant messaging, live voice, text chat, and file sharing, viewing and editing. Similarly knowledge discovery in P2P environment refers to knowledge searching, an up healing and semantically improved task. On the front of information discovery OpenCola, a Open Collaborative Object Lookup Architecture provides peer to peer model for information discovery having application platform using autonomous, collaborative agents to collect, analyze, and deliver dynamic content wherein users with OpenCola Folders defining areas of interest by selecting relevant documents and Opencola's ‘relevance queues’ locating other OpenCola peers and looking for the document that match the profile. Relevant documents being returned to the user who can score them for relevance and thus train the Folder about their interests, thus searching on the basis of user profiling is significant advantage of P2P systems. However searching and relevantly matching by means of metadata automatically generated by said system poses serious question on the relevancy factor of the search results, making knowledge discovery a difficult task, though technology is promising in that regard.
Till date all knowledge management projects are mainly concentrated at managing knowledge resources at an enterprise level having limited subjects to deal with having passive environment of client-server methodology to access a knowledge base. However a distributed model working on the P2P platform for active knowledge sharing has yet not evolved.
It is well established in the industry that knowledge sharing is an active process rather than currently followed passive process. For active sharing one needs to hold active communication, underlining the requirement of human intervention in the very process of knowledge discovery thus none of knowledge discovery is complete without human communication. Presently available communication platform like Chat platform forms an effective and interactive mode of communication. The non real time counterpart of the same is discussion groups or Usenet wherein each user joining in discussions, ask questions, help others with questions, make announcements related to the group, or just see what others are talking about. Thus forming reactive forum discussing one or more undefined topics making the discussion matter out of scope of subject matter further adding to the irrelevancy in the process of knowledge discovery.
All communication within a discussion group is carried on by e-mail. A user joins or subscribes to a group and then shares in the discussions of the group. A message sent to the group is usually broadcast via e-mail to all members of the group. So these discussions are public. There is an exception; some groups are moderated and a message sent to the group is first routed to the person serving as moderator. On the downside the lacks of control lead to disastrous ending and unwanted spate in the members of the group wherein ‘flame’ being the usual phenomenon includes insulting, scolding, berating, or downrighting nasty about the author of the original message, which is far away from any valuable information sharing and doesn't solve any means. Furthermore several Usenet, social, relational and personal network development initiatives have resulted into big failure because of multiple reasons including lack of control, lacks of matching, searching shortcomings, lesser value added contents.
ECommerce because of financial concerns being significantly important faculty of knowledge discovery regarding product sell and purchasing make human involvement mandatory, the same is emulate by various companies by extending existing call centre technology into Internet sales environments. The further improvement of it is realized in terms of customer Relationship Management modeled in online mode as eCRM facilitating availability of product catalogs and FAQs not satisfying customer need up to the mark, few of it facilitates meaningful, direct human interaction through online channel. However online chatting or instant messaging is the most personalized and sophisticated mode of interaction provide effective tool for rich interaction including guiding materials and voice over IP (VOIP) communication, if the all the communicating parties having right equipment to their computer. Still further the existing systems declining the very availability of expert human to transfer knowledge and a system meant for searching and matching the same.
In an attempt to add more intelligence to communication process, in patent application no 20050044008 providing a method for customer needs identification and accordingly forwarding the same to appropriate agent for sales transaction. The customer however, while engaging sessions on the enterprise web site is not an identified entity, thus chances of considering casual customers as a serious prospective customer are more and ultimately leading to increased failure in sales transactions. Identification of customer can provide monitoring ability to well judge the prospective customer profile and the same is missing in the present system. Also the system function is only limited as a supplementary module to ecommerce facilitation. The problem of effective asking & providing knowledge, knowledge community building and collaboration are far away from sight due to centralize structure of the system.
In the U.S. Pat. No. 6,938,068 issued to IBM a knowledge delivery system is devised wherein plurality of experts are categorically and quality wise listed in a centralize database are questioned by one or more question poser and expert answering the question. Though this forms an effective knowledge gaining medium, the communication is only a one way, wherein users can not contribute anything to said system other than question. Further a class of dumb students where only teacher is delivering knowledge and students are only listening to it forms a absolutely ridiculous and wrong learning method, learning is a pretty active process wherein knowledge seeker always desirous of discussing it with the peers, the system lacks such arrangement putting users in an unidentified discrete isolated environment.
Further aspects of knowledge progression are not taken into consideration wherein the system leaves preidentified experts without any assistance to gain, manage their knowledge resources to solve their problems, subsequently resulting in the poor quality of answering as knowledge is a actionable intelligence engrossed in the brain through direct experiences or indirect experiences and needs active interaction for its progression, the present system curtails this very mandatory requirement of the knowledge sharing.
On the economic front the present system follows a typical shopping store customs of customer as a purchaser and service provider as a provider. However knowledge is such an entity which all human bears in one or the other sense, hence everybody should be able to share and sale it, the one who is in possession of it should be able to price it, negotiate it and sell it within his abilities and system having quality control over it.
The present system doesn't insures instant knowledge availability because of its centralize nature, as experts are listed on the centralize web site, a knowledge seeker attempting to pose question may encounter busy status, this expert unavailability problem is identified in another U.S. Pat. No. 6,871,322 issued to IBM, wherein the posed question queuing method is adopted, which ultimately results in withheld timely delivery of answer to the question poser, thus the very issue of timeliness of answering is not solved.
In another patent application no 20050086290 a method for expert support and system for customer interaction is provided wherein though this system provides advantage over the prevailing services like “Google answers” (http://answers.google.com/answers/) and yahoo answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/) in terms of instant online interaction with customer mediated through dummy expert called agent being supported in the background by real expert group. Such system may work effectively but would again be forming a class of dumb knowledge seekers, listening to experts and more interestingly lacking freedom of expansion wherein with increase in the subject matters experts group will keep on increasing, it will become for this system to handle the complexities of expert group management as the system itself is of limited scope to support the customer service division of any enterprise, does not simulate the public wide knowledge sharing network. Whereas Google and Yahoo answering systems are typically passive answering systems which are more a entertainment than serious knowledge dissemination where a querying party posing their questions and experts answering the same in certain estimated time, wherein the experts answering the questions are not identified and no provisions are made to provide freedom on part of users to choose the experts or to contribute own expertise into the system as user is also a unidentified entity, further the experts liability towards improper answer is also a debatable issue.
Similarly yet another patent application no 20050283474 aimed at centralize knowledge base creation in preidentified categories thereof wherein the said knowledge base is created through collaborative efforts of distributed contributors who input their questions and answers pairs alongwith its classification into the system by means of look up tables so that the knowledge seekers while extracting knowledge from the system could identify precategorised knowledge by means of similar look up tables. On the flipside, again the said system illustrating only a enterprise level limited knowledge management system having no control over the data inputted into the system. Further the system doesn't encourage human to human communication, hence lacks real time availability of knowledge, wherein the systems ignoring the contextual relations between preidentified categories and keywords also does not take into consideration variability, absolency and dynamics of information in form of answers stored therein.
Yet another U.S. Pat. No. 6,901,394 issued to AskMe Corporation teaches an enhanced knowledge management system facilitating person to person knowledge sharing via centrally managed knowledge portal exerting load on said system resulting in delay at the user end. Further the communication between knowledge seeker and expert is one way wherein the expert is acting as passive entities, merely listed under a list of experts denying the consultative knowledge sharing wherein such consultant is paid for impartation of particular expertise of knowledge, thus underlying the causal connection of information and knowledge valuation and economics behind it and same is not addressed in the present invention. Further the answering methodology is not controlled hence system cannot guarantee timely answers, and reiteratively as economics behind answering queries is not clearly defined hence keeping users away from competitive quality and pricing.
In an attempt to widen the scope of relevant human to human communication so as to add collaborative intelligence in searching internet resources a U.S. Pat. No. 6,745,178 issued to IBM teaches a method for tracking users of similar interest based on certain rationale of results called answer sets of one or more proprietary search engines. This technique relies on historical user search trends to make basic assumptions as to compare desired information. On the flipside though systems technically seems sound in deriving matching algorithms, the matching parameters itself is a weak candidate to compare, as human integration in a network medium is possible only when the parties communicating are at a currently considered instance are interested in the subject matter or not. Matching the uses on the basis of historic data contents may result in the mismatch as any user may no longer be interested in the subject matter. The human behavioral dynamicity being uncontrolled act is highly ignored fact while devising the present matching methodology wherein said dynamicity of users in terms of likings, behavior and needs may culminate into the system indexing too many things related to each user which may become uncontrollable.
Further context of queries matching based on score difference of respective answer sets facilitating matching seems to be quite dubious approach as prestored answer sets may loose contextual attachment with the queries resulting in error matching score and hence irrelevant user matching.
Still further the answer sets are formed from the plurality of search engines, as each search engine uses different search algorithm result in different search results for similar search strings, hence deriving similarity score based on the one or more different sources of searching following different methodology of semantic interpretation may result in contextual mismatch even though having match score much above threshold level.
The indexed data, answer sets storage and handling of multiple queries at a centralize server accounts for enormous amount of hardware resources, wherein timeliness of such collaborative searching and chatting can not be guaranteed considering the fact that users are looking forward to faster and more relevant search results.
The complexities involved in adding intelligence to human query interpretation and reply by the machine has been addressed through the artificial intelligence enablement of man machine interaction by means of capturing semantic details of the same through specialized tools of taxonomies and semantic ontology. In this effort it works best for data interpretation, the further part of it including the supernatural human ability to understand context and related perspectives can not be addressed beyond doubts.
As human abilities of experiencing, real time answering, both implicit and explicit understanding of matters, problem solving capability, knowledge, guidance, guess, suggestion, logic, interpretation, and related data interpretation is beyond comparison with relationally empowered intelligence of computing machines.
Till date presently available web technologies and other communication media are more or less passive in nature. The concept of blogging providing an effective active medium for knowledge sharing. Still is restrictive and lacks organizer and other management mechanisms to derive most relevant as well as real time knowledge through active dialog.
The internet and peer to peer infrastructure comprises enormous uncommunicated information, making the present digital repositories less knowledgeable. Also as information being a dynamic entity, changes rapidly wherein untraced information in human brain demands certain organizing and managing means. The real time communication with related peers by means of interest wise peer identification has been enabled in various chat and centrally managed limited knowledge management systems. The one such example of peer to peer enablement is KAZZA wherein peers in the distributed network are communicating via file sharing and that of like peer identification is SKYPE wherein like peers are identified and informed to the communicating users online in the a particular chat session. However these existing peer to peer communication systems only communicate and identify information and not knowledge, as knowledge is outstandingly differentiable entity in comparison to information. Thus existence of information and existence of knowledge are two similar possession of brain; they can be very well identified with respect to human expertise. And human sources of expertise need to be preidentified and should be under control based on quality and knowledge dissemination behavior, the same not even suggested in existing systems.
Further the knowlegibility aspect of the these information means is improved upon by means of search engines, unfortunately search engines searches having lesser relevancy, provides improper and incomplete results. Since indexing methods of keyword possibly would be identifying sources which are out of context to the user hence irrelevant. The lack of semantic in existing search engine restricting the present information jungle of web to a mere mine of irrelevant junk information for users. There are various information search engines to find the information are www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.baidu.com, www.altavista.com etc. If we look at certain preorganised information databases like www.dialog.com, www.stn.org, which provide search results of higher relevance, it prudent fact that ultimately at the background of it lot of human knowledge expertise is rendered to organize, index, classify and add value to it to get better search solution, thus knowledge organization and dissemination are certainly human centric activity which require technological facilitation for faster, effective and environment specific enability.
Centralize indexing has inherent severe security & management limitations, further universal search is not possible wherein prevailing security concerns does not allow anybody from anywhere anything, the probable solution soughed after for enabling universal search is desktop searching, however centralize model for desktop searching wherein each of desktop by itself is a computing resource does not suit and support universal level adaptation. Rather use of the desktop for indexing self data and making them available for searching sounds to be workable concept.
Security of users' data and information in the network is of paramount importance when operating in an organized networked environment for successful implementation thereof, hence while indexing user's computer contents the usability control must rest with the user himself/herself. In this context permission based sharing is not practiced in the presently available desktop search engines.
The general approach followed even during hot discussions about the effective enablity the desktop search engine is about only sharing contents and indexes to make them searchable by others, whereas actual entry of the said searching keyword is not regulated at the host desktop wherein the each of host cannot predefine its preferences for allowing search for any of the keyword or taxonomical derivatives thereof which are obliviously linked through parent class thereof. Thus blocking search conduction at the host requires distributed processing of the indexed data and its host level validation for secured operation thereof.
To inculcate the aspect of semantic intelligence a formation of semantic web by means of implementation of semantic ontology and RDF technologies are underway, which are proving to be very complex for users to operate and tedious in execution. These drawbacks of the prior art underlining the importance of human intervention in the knowledge activity and machine as a supplementary solution for intended solution.
Example: The question “How to setup Software Company in New York, USA?” can not be answered completely by search engines thus requires human agents' multi Human Services combined with multi sources of information enabled via technology and logical organization of the framework to enable technology is been addressed herewith as a principal of the present invention.
Still though exceptionally intelligent advertising methods are working successfully, the eCommerce enablement by that means is doubtful and questionable. The significant basic thrust of either advertising or eCommerce is the customer. The existing system and methods though claims to identify the related customer, the question remains if the said user is an actual customer. Hence it is well set and widely experienced by almost everybody that the rate of eCommerce conversion from the said adverting is remarkably low as the ad viewers are not the actual customers or the one who are being adjudged on the probabilistic model of chances.
Thus what we further need is worldwide distributed knowledge organization and distribution system, ascertaining human to human communication for want of knowledge.
Timely knowledge is great help; hence a system which automatically presents a knowledgeable human expert agent in real time is highly required.
An organizing and controlling means for accrediting such expert human agents is needed as in case of any knowledge dissemination sources, which needs approval and qualification to operate hindering the improper utilization of intellectual properties.
Enhanced level of human mediation in all aspects of knowledge gaining and dissemination process via a technological enablement is an urgent requirement.
A new rule based economic model to govern and regulate such human mediation for more intelligent and satisfying knowledge and resources sharing.
In the view of foregoing, the present invention disclosure of Universal Human Service Framework (UHSF) system and method provides software implemented automation facilitating human involvement in the process of knowledge invocation in a distributed peer to peer environment.